Uludağ appears in the novel as a remembered holiday setting rather than as a fully described landscape. Its significance lies in a family recollection: during a visit there with the Demirbağs, Kemal’s mother and Belkıs shared late-night conversation while the men played poker, a small scene that reveals a friendship and a social world preserved in memory.

Place in the Narrative

A chapter is titled “A Holiday on Uludağ,” naming the location as the setting of a holiday in the book’s sequence. The supplied account does not develop the place through descriptions of its scenery or activities; instead, Uludağ becomes legible through the people who spent time there and the remembered routines of their visit.

The Recalled Visit

Years later, Kemal’s mother recalled that she and Kemal’s father had spent time in Uludağ with the Demirbağs, when their eldest son, Demir, was her lover. While Kemal’s father and Demir went off to play poker, she and Belkıs remained together long after midnight in the hotel’s rustic bar, drinking tea, knitting, and chatting. The two couples’ separate evening pastimes give the recollection its concrete shape: the men’s poker game is set against the women’s shared conversation and work with their hands.

Memory and Association

Kemal’s mother recounted the visit without once naming Belkıs, even as her story made their companionship clear. Uludağ thus enters the narrative through an indirect act of remembrance, where a place is recalled by way of an old intimacy and the ordinary details of one evening. The chapter title frames the visit as a holiday, while the later account preserves it as part of the emotional history between the two women.